With her versatile talent Padmini lit up the silver screen for over two decades.

A classical dancer, multi-faceted personality, and talented movie star, she brought rare power, charm, charisma, and great beauty to her many movie roles in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Hindi.

A star with a track record of over two hundred movies, Padmini, the most popular of the trio, the `Travancore Sisters' (Lalitha and Ragini being the other two) died a few days ago in Chennai to which she had relocated after 35 years in the U.S., where she lived with her husband Ramachandran, a doctor.

Born in 1932 in Trivandrum, she made her cinema debut as a teenager in the sadly underrated dance-oriented movie `Kalpana' (1948), an Uday Shankar classic produced at Gemini Studios, Madras.

Soon after, the sisters and their mother P.K.Saraswathi Amma, a woman of immense drive, settled down in Madras to pursue dancing careers. The sisters made a mark quickly and appeared in dance sequences in many movies like `Velaikkari,' `Geetha Gandhi,' `Krishna Vijayam' and `Pavalakodi' (all 1949), winning fame and name.

Gemini Studios boss and movie mogul S.S.Vasan, cast Padmini in the lead in `Mr. Sampat' (1952), a reworked version of Tamil social satire `Miss Malini,' which brought her to the attention of the Hindi cinema world where, before long, she began to make an impact.